Hi Folks,
I'm John Fritz and I work at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Originally, I'm from San Diego, CA, but came back East with my folks when I was 15. I married a Brit who I met in college (25th anniversary this May), and we have two girls, age 14 and 8. When I'm not working or studying, I like swimming, playing basketball and squeeze in a little golf when I can.
I'm interested in this course because I'm working in the field of analytics, both for my job as asst. vp for instructional technology, and in my Ph.D research in Language, Literature and Culture here at UMBC. I'm in my second year and hope to be finished with course work next year.
I'm already impressed with George's organization of this course, as well as the demand it has obviously tapped into. So, just learning more about what other schools are doing will be very helpful.
Thx,
John
Hi John,
Really appreciated what you shared today. Students absolutely should be responsible for their learning and giving them tools to make good choices is a great place to apply analytics.
Thanks also for the practical tip of using a copy of data to run queries. You've likely saved me from making many, many appologies while experimenting with analytics at work!
Really appreciated what you shared today. Students absolutely should be responsible for their learning and giving them tools to make good choices is a great place to apply analytics.
Thanks also for the practical tip of using a copy of data to run queries. You've likely saved me from making many, many appologies while experimenting with analytics at work!
Tanya,
Glad to help. I mentioned it briefly in the presentation, but we have a "Get The Code" download link & video walkthrough you're free to peruse at the following site:
http://www.umbc.edu/blackboard/reports/getthecode.php
As you'll see, this is mainly our PHP & SQL queries against our homegrown production database clone I illustrated. It worked for us, but I realize not many schools would be willing or able to clone their production LMS database. That's why we've recently begun to explore using our iStrategy data warehouse, which also contains our student administration and semester/course registration data. Once you have a centralized data store of the key activity and student grade data, then it's much easier to focus on refining the queries and drill down analysis. But getting past extraction and reporting infrastructure hurdle (Goldstein's Stage 1) is a key step.
Good luck,
John
Glad to help. I mentioned it briefly in the presentation, but we have a "Get The Code" download link & video walkthrough you're free to peruse at the following site:
http://www.umbc.edu/blackboard/reports/getthecode.php
As you'll see, this is mainly our PHP & SQL queries against our homegrown production database clone I illustrated. It worked for us, but I realize not many schools would be willing or able to clone their production LMS database. That's why we've recently begun to explore using our iStrategy data warehouse, which also contains our student administration and semester/course registration data. Once you have a centralized data store of the key activity and student grade data, then it's much easier to focus on refining the queries and drill down analysis. But getting past extraction and reporting infrastructure hurdle (Goldstein's Stage 1) is a key step.
Good luck,
John
You are right John. I work in the customer management industry so, although we are just starting to look at how to use our LMS and other training data, when we started looking, we found out that as a company we gather a significant amount of data. We are truly "drowning in data".
Identifying which bits are important, connecting the right dots, getting the right information to the right people, motivating them to care, and doing this all in an efficient and timely manner.... those are all still in a fuzzy category I refer to as our "next steps."
Clearly there is much more to learn and do....
Identifying which bits are important, connecting the right dots, getting the right information to the right people, motivating them to care, and doing this all in an efficient and timely manner.... those are all still in a fuzzy category I refer to as our "next steps."
Clearly there is much more to learn and do....